December102008

October162007

Tempted to think about what a business algorithm might look like, we are supposed to talk about at Tim O'Reilley's Web 2.0 Expo at Berlin in November, I just invented one, translating, as it were, the general network synthesis algorithm into a specific business one.

I took care to preface it with three good reasons to do it in the first place: (1) cybernetics unsolved problems as recalled by Warren McCulloch, (2) Heinz von Foerster's invitation to do a communication formalism without any communicabilia entering into the formula, and (3), because there is no way to do it without it, a recall of Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form.

Yet, indeed, the algorithm is nothing but a further look at what should be done in the not too far future, spelling all the variables out, action (overflow), talk (culture form), group (number), grid (order), and society (re-entry), and then looking at what happens at the the-entry-levels mating, gaming, tying, switching, and knowing.

Imagine any one distinction being re-entered as a nonlinear oscillator, all of them doing continuously their work of nonlinear prediction, and producing thereby, only noticed by the communication going on itself, the statistical basis for the space of possible businesses to be imagined, created, explored, and exploited.

The business algorithm is a many-sided form consisting of eigen-functions producing their eigen-behavior. Communicabilia are lacking, yet are constantly attracted, since without them, the form of business would not gain the visibility, tractability, and accountability, we need to infer the distinctions playing its recurrence and iteration.

October102007

If somebody would ask us what a perfect panel would look like in autumn 2007, it'd had to be focused on the upcoming Open Protocol and Algorithm ideas in a world based on, but beyond, the current mainstream web trends. We'd first think of our very own Tom and very dear Dirk Baecker as foundation, invite Sean Park because of his views and brilliant Amazonbay video and also Jean-Paul Schmetz as Burda's digital renegade. When it comes to eloquently gluing all that together, Ms. Bunz would be the host of choice.

"Google's commercial success is based on the idea of identifying a variety of factors, from text analysis to human interest, and use them as variables in a giant mathematical equation that generates billions of revenue, widely known as AdSense. But how would a traditional corporation look like when it'd work like AdSense? Will we offshore intelligence to machines? What are the opportunities and threats? What happens when the whole world, from culture to politics become financial markets driven by algorithms? A joint state-of-the-art review of a new breed of businesses relying on mathematical models, potential scenarios how this approach will become mainstream and what this might mean to you and your business."

If somebody would ask us what a perfect panel would look like in autumn 2007, it'd had to be focused on the upcoming Open Protocol and Algorithm ideas in a world based on, but beyond, the current mainstream web trends. We'd first think of our very own Tom and very dear Dirk Baecker as foundation, invite Sean Park because of his views and brilliant Amazonbay video and also Jean-Paul Schmetz as Burda's digital renegade. When it comes to eloquently gluing all that together, Ms. Bunz would be the host of choice.

"Google's commercial success is based on the idea of identifying a variety of factors, from text analysis to human interest, and use them as variables in a giant mathematical equation that generates billions of revenue, widely known as AdSense. But how would a traditional corporation look like when it'd work like AdSense? Will we offshore intelligence to machines? What are the opportunities and threats? What happens when the whole world, from culture to politics become financial markets driven by algorithms? A joint state-of-the-art review of a new breed of businesses relying on mathematical models, potential scenarios how this approach will become mainstream and what this might mean to you and your business."

October012007

There is some irony in John Battelle's account in his book on The Search (2006) of how Google established the success of its search algorithms in and on the Web and how that may have contributed largely to what we are now accustomed to call the Web 2.0.
The irony is that by exactly re-instantiating the good old printing society's principle of producing and dealing with information the computer society could come of age. Reading John Battelle and the literature he is referring to, most importantly perhaps, Jon Kleinberg's paper on Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment and Sergey Brin's and Lawrence Page's paper on The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, both of them dating from 1998, you come to realize that there is no web 2.0 without the preceding construction or reconstruction of authority. Ok, it's a web authority, it's an authority which relies almost (almost!) completely on the self-organising hyperlink structure of the web. Yet, it's an authority nevertheless, which reminds the old battles of the printing society to turn the authority structure of the writing society on its head. The writing society maintained that authority belongs to the sources, holy ones, to be sure. The printing society maintained that authority belongs to the experts, they themselves controlled by further experts, all of them relying on the most recent information, the information best checked according to state of the art methodologies.
And how did search engines take off? They ranked the pages of the web according to links quoting them, to links quoting them coming from pages themselves linked to by others (Kleinberg's authorities), to pages being interlinked as being most often referred to with respect to some issues (Kleinberg's hubs), to anchors describing them, and to the notorious "random surfer" Brin and Page ingeniously introduced to avoid self-circularity.
That's just perfect. Who ever would have started to search the web if only a chaos of results would have been brought to the screen!? So it's the relevance and the reliablity introduced by PageRank and other algorithms which makes us use the search, only thereby producing the clickstreams which Google relies on to make its billions of dollars selling them to advertisers. Of course, the clickstream, once having taken off, does not rely on authority any more but on the surfer's whim. But would that whim have any chance if it could not rely on authority and have its fun circumventing it? There seems to be quite some self-organised authority at the center of the flow architecture of the web, and that's interesting because it resonates with hierarchies constituting some indispensable knots (or nodes) as a gravitational field anchoring the heterarchies (circularities) we are becoming used to live with in the computer age of the society.

There is some irony in John Battelle's account in his book on The Search (2006) of how Google established the success of its search algorithms in and on the Web and how that may have contributed largely to what we are now accustomed to call the Web 2.0.
The irony is that by exactly re-instantiating the good old printing society's principle of producing and dealing with information the computer society could come of age. Reading John Battelle and the literature he is referring to, most importantly perhaps, Jon Kleinberg's paper on Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment and Sergey Brin's and Lawrence Page's paper on The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, both of them dating from 1998, you come to realize that there is no web 2.0 without the preceding construction or reconstruction of authority. Ok, it's a web authority, it's an authority which relies almost (almost!) completely on the self-organising hyperlink structure of the web. Yet, it's an authority nevertheless, which reminds the old battles of the printing society to turn the authority structure of the writing society on its head. The writing society maintained that authority belongs to the sources, holy ones, to be sure. The printing society maintained that authority belongs to the experts, they themselves controlled by further experts, all of them relying on the most recent information, the information best checked according to state of the art methodologies.
And how did search engines take off? They ranked the pages of the web according to links quoting them, to links quoting them coming from pages themselves linked to by others (Kleinberg's authorities), to pages being interlinked as being most often referred to with respect to some issues (Kleinberg's hubs), to anchors describing them, and to the notorious "random surfer" Brin and Page ingeniously introduced to avoid self-circularity.
That's just perfect. Who ever would have started to search the web if only a chaos of results would have been brought to the screen!? So it's the relevance and the reliablity introduced by PageRank and other algorithms which makes us use the search, only thereby producing the clickstreams which Google relies on to make its billions of dollars selling them to advertisers. Of course, the clickstream, once having taken off, does not rely on authority any more but on the surfer's whim. But would that whim have any chance if it could not rely on authority and have its fun circumventing it? There seems to be quite some self-organised authority at the center of the flow architecture of the web, and that's interesting because it resonates with hierarchies constituting some indispensable knots (or nodes) as a gravitational field anchoring the heterarchies (circularities) we are becoming used to live with in the computer age of the society.